Wildl. Soc. Bull. 19:373-374, 1991

WILDLIFE SOFTWARE

                    BirdBase 2 - A DATABASE SYSTEM FOR
                              BIRD SIGHTINGS
                                     
ROBERT EISBERG, Santa Barbara Software Products, Inc., 1400 Dover Road, Santa
     Barbara, CA  93103

     BirdBase 2 is a double-index, binary tree, relational database system (e.g.,
Schneider et al. 1982) written in Turbo Pascal 5.5. It is designed for recording
details of bird sightings, then later extracting needed information from the records.
Typical users are serious bird watchers, ornithologists, environmentalists, wildlife
managers, museum personnel, and others professionally involved with sighting or
cataloging birds.
     Included in the program package is a disk file listing the scientific and
common names of the >900 American Ornithologists' Union-American Birding Association
(AOU-ABA) birds of North America and Hawaii (S. Finnegan and P. Lehman, Santa Barbara,
Calif., pers. commun. 1990). A disk file containing the scientific and common names
of the > 9,000 birds of the world (Clements 1991) is also available. Both files
include the scientific and common names for each bird's order and family, and the
taxonomic sequence number of each species (Clements 1981). Future changes in name or
taxonomy can easily be made in the lists, and then are automatically incorporated into
previously entered bird sightings.
     Bird sightings can be recorded rapidly by using a "Find" feature that has been
optimized for use with scientific and common bird names. Nine built-in life lists
(Inclusive, Nation, Region, Locale, Home, and 4 that are defined by the user) are
updated as sightings are entered. All these lists can be displayed, as can a list of
birds not yet seen. The sightings displayed can be limited to 1 or more of the
following: a world faunal zone; an ABA-defined area; a nation; a U.S. state or
Canadian province; a particular bird watching trip or place; a species, genus, family,
or order; a built-in life list; first sightings only; a range of dates between 1900
and 2100; and the first sighting of each species in the range of dates chosen. There
is also a display used to tabulate the results for a number of people conducting a
population survey. All displays can be shown on the screen, printed, or written to
ASCII or comma-and-quote delimited disk files readable by word processors, spread
sheets, and other computer software.
     Provisions are made for editing the information in bird sightings. Sightings
entered with the North American-Hawaiian names file can also be used with the world
names file. Separate sets of data accumulated on different floppy disks can be merged
into a single data set on a hard disk.
     BirdBase 2 will operate on an IBM-compatible computer run by DOS 2.0, or later
DOS version. The North American-Hawaiian names file requires the computer to have 256
K bytes of RAM. It also must have 1 3.5-inch floppy disk drive, 2 5.25-inch floppy
disk drives, or a hard disk. To use the world names file, a computer with 640 K bytes
of RAM and a hard disk is needed.
     Additional information on BirdBase 2 and its cost is available on the
southeastern software and message exchange (SESAME) and from Santa Barbara Software
Products, Inc., 1400 Dover Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93103; Phone/Fax 805-963-4886.

                             LITERATURE CITED
                                     
CLEMENTS, J. 1981. Birds of the world: a checklist. Third ed. Facts on File, Inc.,
New York, N.Y. 560pp. 

-----.  1991. Birds of the world: a checklist. Fourth ed. Cornell Univ. Press, Ithaca,
     N.Y. 580pp. 

SCHNEIDER, G. M., S W. WEINGART, AND D. M. PERLMAN 1982. An introduction to
     programming and problem solving with Pascal. John Wiley and Sons. Inc., New
     York, N.Y. 470pp.

Received 15 February 1991. 
Accepted 9 March 1991.